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Legal Focus

OCTOBER 2013

Anti-trust law -

This month we take a look at the world of Antitrust law and the issues that surround it. To this end we speak to Ken Dai, partner of Dacheng Law Offices (Dacheng) about his experience within this practice area and the challenges he faces.

Please introduce yourself, your role and your firm.

I earned my LLB and LLM respectively from the China University of Political Science and Law, and the University of Bristol in United Kingdom. Currently, I’m the member of Antitrust Committee of IBA, the Competition Committee of IPBA, the Outbound Investment and Antitrust Committee at the Shanghai Bar Association and Asian Competition Forum, as well as the columnist of Forbes China. My specialization lies in antitrust, competition law compliance, merger control

filing and private antitrust

litigations. I am one of the pioneer lawyers to practice antitrust law in China.

Dacheng, founded in 1992, is one of the first partnership law firms in China. It is headquartered in Beijing, with more than 40 domestic branch offices and representative offices national-wide. With more than 3,000 PRC qualified lawyers, Dacheng is currently one of the largest law firms in Asia and provides full range of legal services. The belief that attorneys should do their utmost in seeking clients’ best interests and avoiding every possible legal exposure is always our core.

What are the key cases you deal with related to anti-trust law?

In terms of merger filing, I have advised a leading multinational in the automotive industry on how to deal with the

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notification procedure in China, including without

limitation incorporating the

antitrust concerns into the deal structure at the early stage, adopting the measure to avoid the gun-jumping risk, documents preparation, pre-notification consultation with MOFCOM, substantive analyses of the transaction.

As for antitrust compliance, I’ve rendered legal services to famous multinationals, from making antitrust compliance program consistent with the PRC Anti- monopoly Law, to analyses on various commercial arrangements from the antitrust dimension (including without limitation information exchange, joint purchase, participation in trade association, and distribution regime).

Merger control regimes are adopted to prevent anti-competitive consequences of concentrations; do you feel it is effective in doing so?

Yes, merger control regimes do make sense in preventing anti-competition. Remedies

including both structural

and behavioral remedies can remove competitive concerns to some extent. Sometimes different

regimes react

differently to the same case, as demonstrated by

the Seagate/

Samsung transaction which is cleared unconditionally by both the U.S. and the EU, but requires complex behavioral remedies by MOFCOM of China.